


Down to the Ground

by gamerfic



Series: Mass Effect: In the Margins [3]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Asari Culture, F/F, Flashbacks, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Moving On, Post-Canon, Thessia (Mass Effect), Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-11 16:42:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15976319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamerfic/pseuds/gamerfic
Summary: After the Reaper Wars, Weshra carries out her late bondmate’s final wishes.





	Down to the Ground

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lady_Katana4544](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Katana4544/gifts).



The Thessia spaceport smells of fresh paint and hot metal, of smoke and decay. The floors and windows are spotless, the chairs comfortable, the shops and restaurants plentiful. The wallscreens and terminals boast all the latest technological innovations. But when Weshra steps off the shuttle, the manicured newness of the place doesn't fool her. She saw the state of the planet as she landed, observed the craters and the ruins and the forest of cranes assembling the frameworks of new buildings all across the horizon.

As she walks through the terminal she passes a child with her face pressed against the window of a toy store, gawking at the treasures within. Her parents, an asari matron and her human partner, stand off to the side, enjoying their daughter's innocent delight. Weshra feels a momentary surge of uncharitable annoyance - _how can anyone take pleasure in trinkets at a time like this?_ \- then suppresses it, ashamed of herself. The war is over. The Reapers are gone for good. This child is young enough that as she grows she may not remember any of it, except in hazy dreams and snatches of vague memory. _And isn't that what we fought for?_ Weshra asks herself. _A galaxy where children don't have to remember war?_

She follows the signs to the transit terminal and gets on the tram that will take her to the regional command center. At ground level, the progress of Thessia's long reconstruction is even more evident. All along the magnetic tracks, asari are clearing away rubble, burying the dead, rebuilding bombed-out homes and schools and businesses. Planetary government relief centers have sprouted all around like maviara fungus in spring, ensuring that no one goes without food, water, power, or shelter. The ride is long, and the humming of the engine briefly lulls Weshra to sleep with her head resting uneasily against the window. She dreams of visiting the house she grew up in, though its roof is caved in and a thin trickle of lava is flowing out its front door. In the dream she climbs rickety, rotten stairs to her childhood bedroom and finds Tashya dead in the bed. When the tram jerks to a halt and wakes her, she welcomes it.

The regional command center is the site of even more renovation work. The sinuous, organic lines of the building are encased in a protective exoskeleton of blocky scaffolding. Most of the sidewalks around it are torn up, leaving only a single narrow walkway leading to the main entrance. Many other asari are also here to conduct business, and the crowd jostles Weshra as she works her way inside. Her movements are tentative, uncertain. She was here once before, but it was a long time ago and for a very different purpose.

* * *

When Weshra went home from the club with the huntress who'd beguiled her on the dance floor, she thought it would be only for a night. She was as startled as anyone when Tashya asked her to stay the next night, and the one after that. Their relationship was fun, but her friends told her it wouldn't last. "She's a commando," Weshra's sister reminded her during one morning meal. "She could get called out on a mission on a moment's notice. Even if she comes back, what's to say she'll always want to come back to the same person? You'll never have any stability with her until she retires. Weshra, you're closer to matron than maiden already. She's not. Are you going to wait fifty years until she decides she's ready to settle down? That's not fair to either one of you."

"You're probably right," Weshra said with a sigh, and privately resigned herself to the knowledge that all good things must come to an end. Even so, she found she enjoyed sharing her life with Tashya, more than she had with any other lover before. For all that her sister had scoffed at the idea, she could imagine herself waiting for Tashya, for fifty years or more.

Several months later, when Tashya's new orders came, Weshra was prepared. She made the most of every moment they spent together, expecting this goodbye to be their last. So it surprised her when, while the two of them lay in bed two nights before Tashya was due to report for duty, Tashya rolled over and asked, "What if we got bonded?"

"Do you mean when your tour is over?" asked Weshra, flustered.

"No. Right now. Before I leave. I've been thinking about it for a while now and I don't see a downside. Bonded commandos earn extra pay. You can have it while I'm gone. Use it to take fewer shifts at the hospital, and focus on your painting instead. And you can move in to my apartment, too. You're always telling me how tired you are of living with your sister."

"All of that is true, but...wouldn't you want to bond with somebody you love?"

Tashya laughed. "Of course I do! I love _you._ There's no one else I'd rather come home to."

In that moment Weshra couldn't think of anything to do but kiss her, long and deep. "I love you, too," she said when they were finished. "This is all so sudden, but...Yes. I want to bond with you."

"Thank the Goddess," said Tashya with relief in her voice. "Let's go to the command center in the morning and get it done. But before then…" Her bright blue eyes sparkled with a seductive gleam. "What do you say we celebrate?"

* * *

They've changed the layout of the building since Weshra's bonding day. She isn't sure if it happened in response to damage from the war, or if they already renovated it during the decades since she's visited. With help from some moderately confusing signage and directions from a friendly sanitation worker, she eventually finds the department she's looking for. It's crowded, but she was expecting that. Asari of all ages and walks of life already occupy every available chair and much of the floor space. A line snakes across the scuffed floor toward the service counter, which has a sign hung above it reading RECLAMATION OFFICE. Weshra joins the back of the queue. The waiting room is oddly subdued, devoid of outward signs of frustration or impatience from the assembled patrons but also lacking in friendly conversation between them. It's not surprising. This duty is somber to begin with, and seeing how many people need to carry it out only makes it worse.

At last, it's Weshra's turn. She approaches the clerk at the counter, an exhausted-looking asari matriarch who's done this too long to bother with pleasantries. "Name of the deceased?" she asks, in a tone somehow equally blunt and compassionate.

"Tashya Porae."

The clerk's fingers dance across her terminal, entering the information into a database. "I'll need documentation proving you as her next of kin."

Weshra flashes her government-issued identification. "I know I'm registered as her bondmate."

The clerk squints and swipes at the screen. "You're in there, but it doesn't look like she has a last will and testament on file. Without one, I can't release her personal effects to anyone. Not even her bondmate."

Weshra sighs. _Tashya never did care much for getting documentation squared away._ "Don't I have any rights here?"

"Not without a will. Plenty of asari have more than one bondmate in their lives. If I gave things to the wrong one, I'd never hear the end of it."

 _You asked for it,_ thinks Weshra. She reaches into the bag she's carrying and pulls out a battered omni-tool. Frustrated, she slams it down on the counter in front of the startled clerk. The device is scorched and cracked all over, and most of its functions don't work anymore. But the button she presses to play back Tashya's dying words on the voice recorder still does. _"Tell Weshra I love her. Tell her...sorry we fought. I was an idiot. Didn’t mean any of it, Weshra. Want… want you to have everything of mine, okay?"_

She's listened to the recording often enough to keep her composure even when Tashya's voice cracks on _"I love you so."_ The clerk isn't nearly so desensitized. Her eyes are wide and glistening with shock and horror. Abstractly helping grieving families track down their late loved ones' belongings is one thing, but actually hearing someone's last moments is another. "Will this serve as a last will and testament?" asks Weshra calmly.

The clerk collects herself, then taps something on her display. "Yes," she says shakily. "Please wait over there."

Judging by the size of the crowd, Weshra's expecting to be there for a while. She leans against the wall to rest, but a few minutes later another asari calls her name from a side door. _They must want me out of here before I make a scene again,_ she thinks. She glances back at the other patrons and feels momentarily guilty; some of them have clearly been here for hours already, with hours of boredom left to go. _We all just want this to be over. The sooner I get my part done with, the sooner one of them can take my place._

The attendant leads Weshra through a maze of offices to a small, windowless white room, furnished only with a table and chair. A large metal crate stenciled with Tashya's name sits alone on the tabletop. "Take as long as you need," says the attendant. "Press the button by the door when you're ready for me to come back." She departs quickly, leaving Weshra alone with her grief and everything that remains of her bondmate.

Recovering Tashya's body from the Ardat-Yakshi monastery would have been far too dangerous. Weshra supposes she should be grateful she got the omni-tool and its recording at all. So many beings in the galaxy never learned the fate of their loved ones, let alone had the news delivered by Commander Shepard herself. Still, without the body, it's been more difficult than she expected to accept that Tashya is really gone. Like most asari, she prefers to bury the dead as part of a traditional siari ritual, to see the physical evidence of the atoms of her loved one's bodies returning to the stream of life to be reborn in new forms. This is why the reclamation center was created: so the families of asari commandos who died in action can take back their soldier's belongings and use them to gain closure in whatever way they see fit.

Weshra takes a deep breath and rests her hands on the crate. She doesn't want to open it and make this moment real, but she wants even less to put it off. So she lifts the lid, sets it to the side, and starts going through Tashya's belongings, removing each item one by one to inspect it.

The crate is barely half full; Tashya never did like to keep anything beyond the essentials in the barracks during deployments. Most of its contents are mundane: her armor and clothing, oil and spare parts for her weapons, medications and creams and cosmetics, that ridiculous overpriced toothbrush she always insisted worked better than Weshra's cheaper one. Other objects are harder to look at. A little cube that projects holoimages of Tashya's family, of their friends, of Weshra herself. A few of Weshra's own small paintings, cracked and faded now thanks to the unforgiving environments in which they were displayed. A book half-read on a tablet - the latest installment in Tashya's favorite series of novels, which she'll never know the ending of now. And at the bottom of the crate, beneath the unmatched socks and the half-charged power cells and all the other detritus of an interrupted life, a tiny purple sleeping gown sized for an asari infant. Weshra crumples its soft cloth in her fist. She puts her head down on the scratched-up table top. For the first time since she returned to Thessia, she squeezes her eyes shut and sobs.

* * *

Tashya and Weshra always spent Janiris alone together. Both their mothers wished they'd join the extended family celebrations, but for years now they'd stood firm, checking in with their relatives in the days before or after the holiday. "It doesn't matter what day we celebrate as long as we're together when we do," Tashya often said. Eventually, their families had dropped the subject, leaving them to enjoy that all-too-brief pause in the bustle of life on Thessia to contemplate the balance of life and commemorate the turning of the year in relative calm.

This year, with Tashya's next deployment looming, keeping their own tradition was especially important to Weshra. But though the streets of the city were as serene as ever, Weshra's mind was not. They ate and drank and exchanged the customary flower wreaths - Weshra's carefully homemade, Tashya's purchased from a price-gouging florist at the last minute, the same as always. As they lingered over their drinks at the kitchen table, Weshra said to Tashya, "I have one more gift for you."

Tashya opened the box Weshra handed her and frowned at its contents. "I don't get it," she said, holding up the little purple gown inside.

"Right, I suppose I should explain. Remember how my mother's getting ready to move?"

Tashya snorted. "She's been getting ready to do that for a couple decades now."

"Well, true, but at least this time she's getting rid of a few things. She found this in a drawer somewhere and gave it to me. I wore it when I was a baby. I can't believe she saved it all these years."

"That's cute. I still don't get why you'd give it to me, though."

Weshra's heart sank. She'd hoped Tashya would understand right away, that she'd grin and laugh and embrace her - but then again, her bondmate had never wanted to dance around the issues. _I'm going to have to be blunt._ "I want to have a baby with you," she blurted out.

Tashya froze and lowered her gaze. After a long pause, she mumbled, "I'm not sure if I want that at all, love."

"And you've told me that, it's just...We haven't talked about it lately, and I want to talk about it again, like you said we could. And with the war, and you deploying again next month, there might not be a better time."

"Funny. That's what makes me think this is a terrible time."

"Love, we've been over this. Even if things seem really uncertain right now, I can't stay on high alert forever. Maybe you can, but I can't. At some point I need to make decisions as if this will go back to normal soon and life will go on."

"And maybe if you'd seen what I've seen on the front lines, you wouldn't be so eager to bring a child into that."

"But I wouldn't be bringing a child to the front lines. She'd be here, with me, on Thessia." What Weshra didn't say was how close to home the war often seemed. The politicians and journalists liked to show off maps and charts meant to reassure the citizens that the Reapers were far away and would surely be contained and eradicated by the combined might of the unified fleet before they got anywhere near Thessia. But Tashya never seemed convinced by such optimistic predictions, and privately, Weshra often wasn't either.

Tashya sighed. "Look. I know it bothers you that I haven't decided yet. But just because I'm not sure I want to have a baby doesn't mean _you_ can't have one with someone else. I bet Kyrus would do it. And I always thought asari with turian genes got the coolest facial markings anyway."

"Stop trying to change the subject. I don't want to have a baby with Kyrus or anyone else. I want to have a baby with _you_."

"You don't want that and neither would the kid."

"Don't tell me how I feel, Tashya. But I think I'm starting to get it now. It's the asari-asari joining thing, right?" Weshra was careful as always not to say "pureblood" to Tashya's face. "You don't need to worry so much. The mutation doesn't run in either of our families."

Tashya made a non-committal grunt. "Doesn't mean it can't still happen. And you know that's not the only problem with it, either."

"Well...times are changing. Just because other children were cruel to you doesn't mean our child will be treated the same. In fact, I'll make sure she won't be."

"You can't promise that. But you're right - times _are_ changing. Which means you don't have to settle down and have a baby as soon as you hit your matron years. I mean, you could argue that the whole reason we made asari civilization is so we don't have to live in caves getting high off eezo and merging with the first alien that crash-lands. Unless you want to do that. I meet plenty of aliens I could introduce you to."

"It has nothing to do with me being a matron now! It's just that maybe, with everything that's happening...maybe no matter what the future holds, I want to hold on to something of yours whether or not you ever come back."

Tashya took a long swallow of her drink and set the empty glass down gently. "I don't want to fight on Janiris," she said softly. "I can't make up my mind, okay? I know that's not what you wanted to hear, but it's the truth. Can we just drop it for now? The mission they've got me on is going to be a short one. I'll think it over while I'm away and we can talk as soon as I get back."

"Okay," said Weshra, but she still felt unsettled. Her dissatisfaction followed her all the way to the day of Tashya's departure. The "yes" she'd been hoping for nagged at her even as they embraced and said "I love you" beside the troop transport. She couldn't wait for Tashya to come back so they could talk things over again. It was how they'd always solved problems before. She believed in Tashya no matter what, and she was sure they could solve this one together, too.

They never got the chance.

* * *

Weshra is calm again and the crate of Tashya's belongings is neatly re-packed by the time she pushes the button that summons the attendant. "I'm finished," she says when the attendant walks in, and her voice is only the slightest bit shaky.

The attendant's face is patient and compassionate, the same as it would be for any other asari in Weshra's place. "What do you want me to do now?" she asks, indicating the crate.

Weshra stands up, scraping her chair back loudly from the table. "Break it all down."

Minutes later she's sitting in what she hopes will be the final waiting room. With her decision made, it shouldn't take long now for her to be free of the reclamation office. The attendant comes in once more, cradling a heavy parcel in her arms. She hands it gently to Weshra. "I'm sorry for your loss," she says, and although Weshra knows she must say those words to all the hundreds of grieving bondmates she meets in this very room, they still sound sincere.

"Thank you," says Weshra, and she walks out of the command center for what she knows will be the last time.

She gets back on the tram, a different line this time, and rides it as far as she can go. The line used to extend a dozen stops farther, but the areas beyond this station are considered unfit for habitation until further demolition and environmental remediation can take place. With a glance upward she sees the gap in the skyline where a Reaper's beam toppled the high-rises of her old neighborhood, including the one where she and Tashya lived so long together. _It's not quite home,_ she thinks, _but it will have to do._

Temporary housing and a few indomitable businesses have taken root in the blocks around the station, but beyond this makeshift village the streets are all but deserted. Weshra walks slowly amidst the ruins of her home, remembering everything it used to hold. The gene therapy clinic where she spectacularly botched a job interview just out of nursing school. The dextro-levo restaurant where she used to meet Kyrus for morning meal, before he moved back to Palaven and died there in the war. The art supply store where she bought her paints and canvases. The little jewelry boutique where the matriarch who owned it could greet every repeat customer by name, no matter how long they'd been away. The club where she and Tashya had shared their first dance. All the houses and schools and temples and shops she'd taken for granted as she passed them each day, now reduced to rubble or rendered dark and silent. Even if all of them are rebuilt, none of them will ever be the same as they used to be.

At last she comes to an overgrown park. It doesn't hold any special meaning for Weshra - she thinks she and Tashya may have attended someone's child's name-day party there, long ago - but it's good enough for what she needs to do. She is so tired, so ready to be finished. She finds a bare patch of earth amidst the tipped-over benches and the dead trees and the cracked stone walking paths and the broken-down playground equipment, takes a trowel from her bag, and starts to dig. The topsoil is dry, crumbling beneath the blade of her tool, and she wonders if Thessia is too barren now, if this is even going to work. But eventually she reaches dark, damp loam beneath it and understands with relief that something of her home planet has survived.

She keeps digging until the hole is big enough to hold the object she received at the reclamation center. Cautiously, she unwraps the fabric enfolding the thick greyish-brown lump the attendant so recently pulled from the recycler. She knows this humble pod contains the component atoms of everything Tashya left behind, broken down into carbon and oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen. It's the holos and the underwear and the unread books and the little purple gown that no baby will wear again. It's difficult to drop the pod into the hole she dug, harder still to sprinkle the first shovelfuls of dirt over it. But it has to be done, or Tashya's energy will never be transformed, will never become something new within the great universal consciousness that all life shares.

"I'm sorry I fought with you too, love," Weshra says softly as she fills in the hole. "I was wrong. I thought there was only one way to keep you with me forever. But you're _already_ with me forever, aren't you? You changed me just by being who you were - who you _are_. So as long as I remember you, you'll stay with me. And as long as the universe exists, some part of you will remain in it." She smooths the soil flat over the buried pod. "I love you, Tashya. I'll never forget you. I'll be with you again someday."

Weshra knows what's going to happen next, but she still gasps when it does. A tiny glowing blue shoot bursts out of the soil and unfurls its yellow-veined leaves to the shrouded sun. The reclamation center added one other thing at the center of the pod: the seed of a native tree, its growth sustained by the latent element zero infused in all of Thessia. Ordinarily, an asari would be buried with one such seed clasped between her hands. Her body would feed the tree, giving her friends and family a living memorial and a reminder of how she had returned to eternity. _This is just as good,_ she thinks, blinking back tears.

There's nothing left for Weshra to do. The tree, and Tashya's memory, will keep existing now no matter what she does. With a last wistful look behind her, she turns and walks back toward the station. She doesn't know what the coming decades and centuries will hold for her; she only knows that Tashya's spirit will be a part of them, and that she'll never stop trying to make her beloved bondmate proud of her. Under a cloudy sky, while she isn't watching, the tree keeps slowly growing, stretching ever higher and into the future.


End file.
